My friend is a freelancer who uses c2 + a lot of my plugins. He did not know how to write any text code, so c2 is the only choice.

Why not? There's nothing against it. I know a lot game devs who use Stencyl and Construct 2. I meet them almost every day. And some of them make their daily income from this games. But they also know that certain game types are not possible or to hard to implement (in terms of reliabilty and stability) and they refuse to join a certain project.

spy84 Don't feel offended, that wasn't my intention. AND I never said, it's for prototyping only! I said - and I qoute myself here -

Tools like Stencyl and C2 are aimed for ppl who don't want to get into software development but want to design a game.

and I also stated that this tools are great for prototyping as well. This was also said by Mike and I agreed with him to this point. If I wasn't clear in my statement, my apologize!

You CAN do clever and sophisticated things with C2, Stencyl (Okay, a game with 115 scenes slowed the editor down like hell) or GameMaker (there's a guy who writes emulators of ZX Spectrum or C64 in GameMaker so the games from this machines can be load into the GameMaker made emulator, that's awesome).

All I want to say is: don't expect the (hardware-) support, speed and flexibility of a native development environment from such all-in-one tools who specialize into delivering HTML5, for example. That's it. They all have it's strengths and weaknesses.

The whole thread runs in circles now.

It's saturday, I have some spare time and want to start my first (bigger) production C2 now - a port of a game I did with Stencyl. Time to grab a coffee, get my notes and sketches and start something new. I'll be back with tons of questions, be warned!

btw: I like the store. I already bought some assets from here.

michael i dont understand why and from where the opinion that c2 is for prototyping and learning tool has established..so with c2 we make a prototype and then what? we go in another engine and build/polish a proper game?

I agree with michael here. Tools like Stencyl and C2 are aimed for ppl who don't want to get into software development but want to design a game. This is a very important target group!

This tools hide the complexity of coding, but this comes with a price: flexibility and overhead. If you are an experienced developer, you even wouldn't look into Stencyl or C2: you would fire up your Java-IDE or Xcode and develop it native, simple as that. I personally use Stencyl and C2 (hopefully) for quick prototypes or simple puzzle games. To try things out, to make things happen quickly.

Sure, you can do sophisticated things with this tools, but they are simply a whole bunch of layered frameworks to make it easy for you. And believe me, sometimes the limitation over coding is frustating, but as I said: everything has it's price.

or stencyl with the epic game (is coming soon) "the ghost song" ? its in the same philosophy all these programs.

Ghost Song is just another platformer who makes heavy use of particle / sprites and some shaders. It's a good example for an artist who dives into developing - a simple game, that looks awesome. This gets more attraction then a clever game mechanic and game play with horrid grafix.

And if you follow the thread and read the title again, you have seen that Pete almost gave up with Stencyl as the engine could not cope with his expectations: he couldn't manage a decend frame rate on 768x480. Native Windows export, btw. Compiling OpenFL into a native application is a complete different story than wrapping a HTML5 game! I think this can't get stressed enough! Btw. I was very frustrated with Stencyl's physics implementation when I did Castle Keeper: I don't need physics, but no sprite collision without physics. How stupid?

I recently moved from Stencyl to C2 (hard thing, if you are a Mac user) because Stencyl has a nice engine, the Haxe-Idea is not bad, but we suffer on Stencyl with the same problems than other tools: OpenFL in Stencyl is always three versions behind, NO support for network / multiplayer, a very slow Java based IDE, the Sketch "drawing code" looks nice, but it's not productive (NO keyboard support) and it gets very very slow if your events get bigger (more code). And if you are a paying customer and read the boards, then you see the same discussions we're facing here: no support, to buggy (the sound support is horrid!), even simple things like drawing text on the screen is a complete mess (now fixed with sprite fonts since v3.1).

To make long story short: every toolset has it's own purpose. You can stretch the limits somehow. But if you know the limits, you can create awesome results within this boundaries.

Hi & welcome to the forums & C2.

Thanks, Matt. I am still looking around

1. For reusing code, the only way I know of is to copy-paste events/objects, & also use the 'replace object' command to quickly apply a set of events to a different object (or family of objects).

Okay, this is then where I have to change my workflow. Not a big deal.

2. Custom behaviors are made using the javascript sdk, but there's so much good stuff already available you'll probably never need to. Just do a search for add-ons made by R0j0hound & rex_rainbow (among others) & you'll see

I already found the stuff from rex and it was very helpfull with some of my experiments. I am not bad with JavaScript and can help myself if needed, but thats what I want to avoid. Otherwise I could simply start the games from scratch, doing them native.

Well, I spend a couple of weeks now in this forums (reading) and - surprise - even with reading thru all the blame here - I decided to support C2 and to buy a license, even If I don't need it for the moment - the free version works fine for me as a beginner (well, I even had to buy a new Parallels license for my Mac just because of C2)

And if I would need 3D, I would buy Unity. And if I would have to do mega big production with 400 levels I might go native and not using C3 - or Stencyl or GameMaker - which have been clearly designed for casual games, platformers and such. If you really need proper physics and high FPS and shaders and console-support, you should really think about the tool you have chosen.

Just my 2 cents.

[...] And if Scirra needs to charge more to be able to hire people to minimally determine if their product actually has bugs they should absolutely do so. Selling buggy software and then making it the job of the user to identify the bugs and create elaborate reports or tech demos is in no way acceptable. Better methods are already employed by any number of companies. [...]

Don't get me wrong, Juryiel. I agree with you. I just wanted to point that everything has its price. (In either way)

On the other hand, Unity is not a good example here (from my point of view). The only thing C2 and Unity have in comon, is that one can use the tools for making games. It's like Wordpad vs. Word. Both do the job.

Unity has a way bigger ecosystem and the productions behind are huge! That makes it also profitable for smaller companies to develop addons and such. And believe me: Unity Technologies started small as well (2003?, 3 guys in Denmark who have failed with their game first)

At the end, Scirra decided to hire a new developer as they understood they growth. To bad that Playtech has aquired YoYo Games and not Scirra. Maybe Ashley should look for some external funding to gain the momentum of this success - and that's what we're talking about: success. More and more poeple use Construct 2, do bigger productions or more complex titles. Now Scirra has to deal with it

Basically it means creating an event sheet that contains specific events for an object or a piece of logic or even generic routines you use in all event sheets, but can then be included in other event sheets for use.

Ah, I understand. Thanks! I'll have a deeper look whats possible and not.

You are talking like they would still be a garage devs. I believe they are more then enough capable to finance couple more workers.

From what I've read, Ashley is the only one who works full time on C2/C3. Tom is dealing with the Arcarde and some ppl help them running their business.

And, to be honest, this is a good setting for a smaller company.

tl;dr

Of course Maybe something worth for them to invest in.

If you expect more (or "better") support and Scirra hiring ppl to support you and your projects, then you have to expect higher product prices (of course, one has to cover the cost). But if the product gets pricey, you start complain on the price, because the product hadn't changed that much? (look at GameMaker, up to 800 USD!)

I like the idea of asking some of the mods here to contribute, either pro bono or for some bucks and the reputation. Might help to filter out the real C2 problems.

I know we could build a module event then include it in whatever layout we use the bubble in, but as a developer it seems to me it'd be cleaner if it were contained at the object level itself. if that makes any sense...

I just moved from Stencyl and missed this feature in C2 (It's called "Actor Behaviors" that can be written in Stencyl and reused everywhere).

wizaerd You mentioned "Module Events". What's this? Is this something that could help me here?

.dripple

Since stencyl is more close to scripting how does construct work is there a if,when,variables to do more advanced things or does construct go so far?

Actually, it's exact the opposite: it looks like that Stencyl offers more flexiblity when it comes to "coding", but at the end, you are limited to the blocks delivered with Stencyl (or extensions). C2 Events, Actions and - more important - Object-Expressions over way more options Stencyl gives. Look just at the math or Scene properties and such.